Criticizing Guild Wars 2

DISCLAIMER: If you want to criticize my post, feel free to do so (constructively, of course). However, if you want to do so, please READ it. Especially point 4 and its subject line: I complain about their marketing strategy. I do NOT complain about the skimpy armor. I even say so in the text. Read it, then complain about the actual content and not about what you THINK I wrote. Thank you. :)

First things first, as a regular or even casual reader of our blog, you’re well aware of the fact that I’m a huge fan of the game. But let’s be honest: the game isn’t perfect and I know it never will be a perfect game. Why? Several reasons. For one, no game is ever perfect. They’re too complex to get them bug-free and especially MMORPGs evolve and get content added, mechanics changed, etc. All of that means plenty of risks for adding new bugs. But even when not looking at bugs, there just can’t be a perfect game out there simply because there are too many players who all like and dislike different aspects. Some won’t accept a game without PVP in every region, others need their weekly raid evenings, and so on. That means that we will always have people argue about a game and its (lack of) perfection. And it also means that the probability of a game company developing a game in exactly the way that I want is very slim/non-existing.

Guild Wars 2 is still in beta, so bugs are to be expected. In general, I am always very careful when criticizing games in beta. It is a work in progress, after all, and I wouldn’t want to hurt a game’s – and company’s – reputation by writing something too negative about the game before it’s even been released. On the other hand, if we never speak up and say what we dislike, how are the developers supposed to know what the players think of something? There’s a reason companies have beta tests and ask for feedback.

Having said all that (should my intros be shorter, I wonder…), I’m now going to list a few things about Guild Wars 2 that I know will annoy me – more or less strongly – and that will probably make the game less perfect for me – but not “bad”! That’s a big and important difference.

1) Mystic Chests
Syp over at Massively wrote a good piece about lockboxes in MMOs. To be honest, I was shocked when I saw my first lockbox in Guild Wars 2. I’ve always found it cheap when games had those and it was disappointing to see it appear in this game. While there may not be any “advantage” in there, I still think it’s a terrible way to earn money. What annoys me is the whole gambling part: You never know if spending money on yet another key will result in you getting that special item from the lockbox.

If you ask me, it’s abusing a weakness of us humans when it comes to calculating probabilities. Some spend 50 times 1 dollar trying to get a specific reward and end up empty-handed instead of just buying it for 35 dollars, for example… mostly because there is the probability (albeit a very, very low one) that they might get it on their first try and end up having spent only 1 dollar. And then they spend another dollar, and another and another and at some point, they think that now they have to finally get it, right? And they have already invested so much money that quitting would mean they have simply lost their investment without earning anything.

Bookahnerk has also found an interesting comment about this system on Reddit, where a poster mentioned Lunia and that in this game, you drop keys and need to buy the boxes from the shop. It sounds less tempting this way. After all, you don’t have the “item” wrapped in a box in your inventory already. You only have a key. And if you ever feel like getting a box to use this key, it’s fine. And if not, no harm done because there’s no item rotting in your inventory, just a key. Yes, I’m aware of the fact that it’s technically exactly the same thing. But the perception is a different one. And I’m pretty certain that there’d be less temptation to buy boxes whereas if you have lockboxes drop in your game, your players will probably buy more keys from the shop than they would buy boxes for the dropped keys. We’re curious and can’t calculate probabilities correctly (well, I’m sure a lot of people can but from personal experience, I’d say that this is the minority). In other words: It’s an easy way to earn money. But from where I stand, it’s cheap and dirty.

However, this is me criticizing something I haven’t seen the full scope of so far. We do not yet know enough about what will be in the lockboxes (exclusive items or not), if they will have keys drop in the game, if the lockboxes have a (e.g.) 90% chance of including another key (I think I read somewhere that a player found a key inside together with an item), if we’ll be able to sell the items we find in the lockboxes, etc. I’m just saying I really dislike this general concept, but I am curious how they will handle it specifically.

2) Voice of female norn

Norn are supposed to be really tall. And with that, naturally, comes a deeper voice than we would expect from the average human. If I hear the voice without looking at the screen, it fits and it sounds like a wonderful choice, but once I see the norn’s doll-like face, I’m not so sure anymore. It just doesn’t fit to hear her with such a low voice. But maybe this isn’t a problem with the voice at all but rather with the next point…

3) Idealized female characters

I’ve mentioned it before, to which Kadomi had reacted as well. ArenaNet’s stance can be found in this interview:

“Univers-Virtuels: So, at the moment the humans are very young and it’s not possible to make it older as a character, or it will be possible to turn off the make up for woman?
Kristen: I’m not sure, we have some variety in there, but largely we want an idealized beautiful base face, so I think the humans are probably going to remain within a certain spectrum.”

I was happy to see that they have added one face that makes the character look a bit older. Then you can further customize it by changing the look of the nose, mouth, chin, etc. But that is only for the human and it’s only one face. The others still have that certain doll-like look. It’s especially annoying for norn because they’re tough! It seems weird to have them appear with a doll-face. I also don’t like the sound of “idealized beautiful base face”. Yes, this idealization is what we’re seeing in women’s magazines every day. This is what’s called one of the reasons for the rise of eating disorders (in women and men)… I understand that they want to add beautiful faces. I would assume that more people choose those faces than faces that the general public wouldn’t call “pretty”, “beautiful” or something like that. I just do not get why they refuse to add some more regular faces. Especially as the question above was aiming at faces “without that much make-up”. Either way, I will go for the regular face they have added because I find it more believable (ah yes, I know we’re in a fantasy setting, so theoretically everything is possible and thus, believable. But still…). On the other hand, we can see that you can go for some extremes when creating your characters. I’m not sure they would call the nose that you can see in the screenshot “idealized beauty”. But at least, we can reenact Cyrano de Bergerac. ;)

I will most likely play asura and charr as my main characters, so it won’t bother me that much. And I do like having a pretty doll character – but I would really love to have more variety. What is the harm in having an older face (one with wrinkles or just more defined facial features)? After all, they are in the game for the male characters. They have added one face for the female humans, though. So there is still hope we could maybe see something like that for the norn as well. Something that makes them more equal to the choices we have for male characters.

4) Armor and ArenaNet’s marketing strategy

As mentioned above, Kadomi wrote about the faces but in the same entry, she also addresses the “armor issue” which goes hand in hand with the idealized faces (and she says it much better than I will here, so if you’re interested in this topic, go read her blog post about it). Why do they present the female characters in suspenders? A word, by the way, that I only learned now thanks to Guild Wars 2 – that is, the English term for it, of course. What does it tell you about a game that teaches me the English terms of “sexy underwear” (“Reizwäsche” in German, by the way… in case you were wondering). I’m not happy with them presenting this as the typical clothing for some of their classes (mesmer and elementalist most of all) as this is what the characters look like when creating them.

After playing for a bit, I did get to see cloth armor that wasn’t as revealing and they have a system in place that makes it possible for me to merge the better stats of an item onto a piece of clothing that I like. So I’m not annoyed that they have revealing armor in the game. I am annoyed, however, that they presented us only this sexy underwear as armor. And even though there was a large outcry (not just from me, I might add!) in their fanbase, they did not add pictures of different armor in order to show us that when they said we would have choices, they didn’t just mean “a choice between a bra or bikini top”.

5) No scenery screenshots
This is something that makes me grind my teeth and scratch my head. I just don’t get this decision at all. ArenaNet doesn’t want us to take screenshots of the scenery without featuring our own character because they want us to get attached to our character. I love looking at screenshots of the game’s world but I am not interested in looking at some person’s character at the same time. This doesn’t interest me at all. Also, I do get attached to my character and if I want to take a screenshot of “me in Lion’s Arch”, I will do so. But if I want to take a screenshot of “this nice windmill”, then please let me do that without having “me in front of this nice windmill that you can’t see because my dear character is blocking the view”. There is a workaround, by the way. You can either /sleep or /sit and then work with the camera angle to get a screenshot without your character on it. I used /sit for my screenshots and unfortunately, my charr’s horns can be seen in a few of them. Oh well. Most of the time, it works just fine but why do we have to resort to such a workaround in the first place? Guild Wars 1 allowed us to zoom in and I haven’t heard anybody complain about the game and its design because we can do that.

While this workaround is fine for taking screenshots, video makers need to ability to move around without having their own character centered all the time. Machinimas probably won’t work in Guild Wars 2 and that’s just really, really sad if you ask me. There’s a not too old discussion about this on GuildWars2Guru.

And that’s it for today. All in all, it’s not a “list of things gone horribly wrong” or something like that. It’s just some things that bug me and that I wanted to get out of my system. I have to say, however, that the inability of taking screenshots or making videos without having my character in the center is the biggest issue I have here. The other parts probably won’t spoil my general fun in the game (especially the marketing – who cares about that in a year, right?) but taking pretty screenshots is what I really enjoy. I have a ton of screenshots from all sorts of MMOs I’ve ever played or tried out stored on an external hard drive and I’ve taken 640 screenshots in Guild Wars 2 so far and that was after only playing for 4 days! And most of those screenshots are from Lion’s Arch… I can’t wait for doing the same in Hoelbrak, Divinity’s Reach, Black Citadel,… (but next time, I will choose a character without horns! Asura would be perfect… *hint*)

Being at the EUFanDay – or: Musings about ArenaNet’s game philosophy

As you, my dear readers, may have noticed already, I was invited to the EUFanday in Brighton. Yeah, okay, there’s no way you can have missed that. ;) When we got this invitation, we were… flattered. The next question, however, was: Who will go? Bookahnerk or me? Once that was settled (it was an ugly fight, I can tell you! ^^ ), I was very much looking forward to it. Then I saw the NDA… we weren’t allowed to talk or write about our game experience. As you have also very likely noticed, the NDA was lifted by now. However, that only happened after our return back home. During those two days in Brighton, the NDA still stood and we were reminded of it several times. When the EUFanDay was finally announced on Twitter (we had, of course, been invited a few weeks before that), I saw various reactions. Quite a few people were confused and wondered what this was all about. More importantly: They wondered what they would have to do in order to be able to go and why ArenaNet announced it so close to the actual date. In other words: I think that announcement and the title of the event were a bit misleading: It was an invitation-only event and while most of us who had gotten invited were fans, not everybody there was a fan and follower of Guild Wars 2. We’re all gamers and MMO-players, of course! However, a “regular fan”, that is, one without a blog or a fan site, didn’t have a chance to be invited. I would have wished for a clearer announcement or clarification what this was all about.

Anyway, I also saw people claiming this was a press-event. I even saw people call us “journalists”. No, I’m not. And just think about the last beta event where the press didn’t have the NDA and were allowed to report about the game. We, clearly, didn’t see us as press (at least, the people I talked with about this) and we weren’t treated like press either as the NDA was firmly in place! So we didn’t see ourselves as press and apparently, so didn’t ArenaNet. I have to admit, I was a bit confused why we were brought there. Why had they invited us? And what could we write about once we got home? Well, apart from the interview, of course. After talking with a few others, I knew that I wasn’t alone in my frustration (which, by now, is gone because they did change their mind and allowed us to freely talk about our game experience) and my wondering why we were there.

On the first day, however, not long after we had arrived in the Lighthouse, which was the building in which we got to play Guild Wars 2, Stéphane kind of gave me an answer to my “identity crisis as far as being a blogger was concerned”: I had just gotten a cup of coffee and stood there sipping on it when I heard Stéphane talk to others. I don’t know what had been said or asked before and I didn’t write down Stéphane’s answer so I’m paraphrising here. According to him, for ArenaNet an MMORPG consists of two things: One is the game itself. But this game alone (that is, Guild Wars 2 in our case) is not an MMORPG. Only when you add “the community”, you get an MMORPG. Without the community, it’s not an MMO! And that’s what ArenaNet has been trying to design.

I guess you can see it in the steps they have taken so far: There is the game which doesn’t require people to play a certain way. It doesn’t require them to fight over loot or crafting nodes. Everybody gets something. We’re not rivals nor in competition with each other. They tried to design the game in a way that it supports building friendships, teams, people helping each other without jumping through hoops first (e.g., you can help somebody kill a tough mob and you’ll get a reward even if you weren’t in the same group!). They’re trying to make it easy to collaborate and play together (no groups necessary, no holy trinity). They’re trying to get rid of artificial barriers (e.g., raiding equipment, PvP equipment etc. You can get your gear the way you prefer – that is, through crafting PvE or PvP. I’ve written about their design philosophy not too long ago. So that’s the in-game part.

When you look at how they interact with their fans, future customers and players, you can see a similar treatment. After last year’s GamesCom, we also wrote about their interaction with fans. They, the developers of the game, were in the masses watching and observing people trying out the demo. They were also there and answered questions, listened to feedback. It wasn’t this one-dimensional way of players writing on forums, giving feedback or asking questions without receiving answers and not knowing if the developers even read their postings. Here, at GamesCom, they could talk to them, hear answers and make sure their feedback was heard!

As I said, we’re not press. The press’s expertise is writing about games, reporting, reviewing. We as bloggers and fan sites do the same. However, we have the freedom to be a lot more subjective when writing (hence, this rant! ^^). We are also much closer to the community. We ARE the community (in the sense of being a part of it which the press often isn’t). Maybe you remember Martin Kerstein’s posting about building community. I quote one, for me, important sentence:

“The main goal is to be inclusive, not exclusive, to encourage collaboration between communities, and to generate an atmosphere that is helpful, friendly, and above all, respectful.”

So, what longwinded-me is trying to say here is that this whole philosophy of having a game AND a great community seemed to be a reason why we had been invited. The collaboration aspect is one I could see clearly after we had all returned from Brighton. I don’t think I have ever “retweeted” that many people’s blog posts (and in some cases, in languages I don’t even understand) or seen as many trackbacks to my own blog posts. Also, Tasha Darke and Dutch Sunshine from GuildMag worked together to transcribe the interview we had together. Each posted half of the interview on their individual site. Tasha also mentions this in one of her blog entries:

“Dutch and I spoke about various aspects of working together for the better of the community when things line up, the start of which we saw yesterday when we split the load for transcribing the Q and A.”

For them, it worked out just fine: They each only had to do half of the work and both got the “hits” by people visiting their sites (though I don’t think either of them really cares about the latter!). And what did you, their readers, the game’s fans, the rest of the community, get from this? Easy answer: You got to read the interview a whole lot sooner than you would have if they hadn’t split the work! In other words, if we’re working together, collaborating, it’s a winning situation for everybody. ;) And a lot more fun if you ask me!

So for me, this EUFanDay was only partly about getting to play the game. By and large, it was about meeting people that I’d gotten to know online before (or not, as there were people that I’d never interacted with before) and getting to talk about our hobby (Guild Wars 2 as well as blogging/writing).

Apart from the community aspect, there was one other (though related) part: We got to meet the European Community Managers! Who here had even realised we got them before? I had seen their names mentioned in a Tweet and on Facebook. But I had tried to find out more about them, who they are etc. and hadn’t been too successful. You can see them tweet or write on Facebook (something was written by Aidan Taylor if the message ends with “AT” and by Mélanie Corolleur if it ends with “MC”). For us Europeans, having European CMs is great (not culture-wise because Martin and Stéphane are originally from Europe anyway) because they’re in our timezone! It’s a much more direct interaction. They’ve also already said that they will be at this year’s GamesCom, so if you want to meet them in person, make sure to be there!

I’m going to finish my rant now with a short bit of feedback about this trip, a few more pictures and a picture gallery of the Rytlock figure for you guys (the one holding it is Kronos from Onlinewelten, by the way, with whom I had never interacted before the EUFanDay even though I’d been reading on the GW2-Onlinewelten page every now and then).

The trip itself was much too short: It seemed chaotic and rushed at times. I would have loved to have more time to figure out my skills before being thrown into a PvP match but we always had the ticking clock at the back of our minds (there was the scheduled interview and the dinner reservation at the restaurant!). The interview itself had been a bit disappointing because we hadn’t known before that we only got to ask one question per person. Of course, having 25 people with questions in a room means that we can’t actually ask that many. But it was still a bit unsatisfying. From an outstanding person’s view, little was known about the event and I’ve seen people think that we’d return with a big announcement or secret to reveal. If you still think so, I have to disappoint you. What you’ve gotten to read about the event by now is really all we can tell as nothing else was shared with us. There is no announcement and no secret being held back.

The positive parts greatly outweigh those negative ones, though. First of all, I had fun and I enjoyed myself. The flight, hotel and food was paid for and none of those seemed even remotely cheap! Whenever we had any problems while playing the game, we had somebody help us out within a few seconds (my headset was broken and it was replaced within five minutes). There was plenty of food around and coffee, too! Aidan and Mélanie bent over backwards to make sure we were all happy and satisfied. On Monday evening, at 11.30pm, when Aidan was already tired, he still went to the beach with us. Of course, this hadn’t been part of the official schedule but we had mentioned wanting to go there after dinner and he went with us, so we wouldn’t get lost. At no point did those two seem to “just be doing their job”. I don’t think I ever saw any of them without a smile on their face! So, I wish to thank them once more for doing such a great job and taking such good care of us (feel free to show that to your superior, Aidan, whose name I’ve forgotten, unfortunately. ^^)! Also, Matthew Moore was very funny and goofy, especially together with Stéphane while they were taking the group pictures (I have no idea how many we took but about half of us brought their camera to them so they would take a picture of us with them).

To finally get to an end of my posting: If your goal was to introduce us to the EU community managers and help us connect with other European fan sites and blogs, then you all did an amazing job here! Oh, and yeah, the game’s quite nice, too. ;)

EuFanDay: The interview

Cross-posted from Talk Tyria. As always, please go there if you want to comment on the article. Thank you. :)

As I said in my last entry here on Talk Tyria, Nerdy Bookahs had been invited to the EUFanDay that took place this Monday and Tuesday in Brighton. I was the one representing our blog there (a first post about this went up on our blog. It includes a growing link collection for write-ups etc. from the EUFanDay). As part of this event, we got to talk with some of the developers about Guild Wars 2. Or rather, each of us (the invited fan sites) were allowed to ask one question. I’d collected a few more than just that, so that was a bit sad. Fortunately, I didn’t have as many questions as some others, so the disappointment from those who sent in their questions wasn’t that big on my site. ;)

Tasha Darke and Dutch Sunshine have just posted the transcription of the interview. You can find the first part on her blog and the second one on GuildMag.

As those two already transcribed the interview, I will refrain from doing the same. It’s a lot of work and time, after all (thank you for doing that, by the way!). Time which I rather want to spend on ranting and musing about which we got to know from the interview. ;)

I’ll assume that you’ve read the interview now. But I’ll try to write in a way that you know what I’m talking about even if you haven’t. ;) As I said, we had about 25 people (give or take 3) who all asked one question. So the questions were very mixed. We had a few about PvP and what we now know is that ArenaNet want to have structured PvP as an esport. We don’t know anything new about the observer mode but it’s probably a safe bet that they’ll do everything they can to include this as fast as possible post-launch because it’s needed if they want it to succeed as esport. Other than the observer mode, I don’t see a reason why they shouldn’t succeed here. Every character in structured PvP is the same level, has the same quality gear, access to all skills, etc. They also want their structured PvP (and WvW) to be easy to understand and get into. Overflow shards will also allow you to join structured PvP matches (but not WvW), so even if your server is crowded, you can still join those PvP matches. From the interview, I take it that we can expect some kind of announcement about additional PvP maps before release. They mentioned one that has lots of underwater combat and a pirate ship! Another one is supposedly going to make GW1 players feel nostalgic.

On to another area of the game, the community. It was stated again that there will be no restrictions or penalties for switching guilds. You’re supposed to be able to switch whenever you feel like it. How that works in the end remains to be seen. It requires us to let go of what we’ve gotten used to (it really shouldn’t surprise us anymore as it’s not the only thing that will work differently than in previous MMOs). Another thing that a lot of people are worried about is how the fansites will survive (I think there was a huge discussion about this on guildwars2guru) when Guild Wars 2 will have official forums. Regina said that while they will have less time, they’re still going to read the inofficial forums, fan sites etc. and that there will, of course, be people who’ll rather post on non-official sites than on the official ones out of fear of being censored on the official forums. If you ask me, I think it’ll be like we have it now: There isn’t just ONE fan site and ONE blog out there. We have so many different ones and so far, there’s space for all of them. Because people have different preferences and thus, will want to post on one site but not on the other. The official forum will just be “one more” site that you can go to but it won’t be necessary. If all you want is get news about the game and chat with a few friends, why not do that where you’re currently doing it already? There’s no need to move on to the official forums as ArenaNet won’t ask us to shut down our fan sites or blogs.

Something that disappointed me greatly were the answers about the customization for female humans mostly. ArenaNet want them to be idealized and beautiful. So no wrinkles, scars, etc. From what I have seen in pictures (or the customization videos from GamesCom), it looks like all female humans are dolls. I’d really like there to be the option to have different faces (I’m thinking of Warhammer Online here which made it possible to add scars. We’re fighting dragons here, after all! It’d make sense to have scars!). But oh well, it can’t be changed, I guess. And since I want to play Asura and Charr anyway, I don’t really need to worry about the humans. The thing that then made me squeal again was when they mentioned that there will be dances. I feared that we wouldn’t get those (again, like in Warhammer Online where I first realised that I really love fluff like that and I miss it when it’s not there… just like minipets, emotes,… – thankfully, Guild Wars 2 will have all of those!).

One last thing that I want to comment on is the question by gaming-insight.de about where to get the “good items” (that is, the high-level armor). ArenaNet’s philosophy about how we should be playing the game is “do what is fun for you”. In other words: If you enjoy WvW, you should be able to get the gear from WvW. If you enjoy crafting, you should be able to get similar gear with similar stats (in power) from crafting, and so on. However, certain looks will only be obtainable through WvW, crafting etc. So that when you see a player in a certain armor, you know they have done WvW a lot. But they’re not more powerful than you are when it comes to the stats they have on their armor. If you ask me, this is a great direction and one they’ve already done in Guild Wars 1. There’s nothing wrong with having bragging rights. But make them about the look/uniqueness of the gear and not about the stats on the gear! This will make the game much better than handing out gear with much better stats because it means that the whole game world remains open to you even if you decide to ignore a certain part.

Educate the gaming masses!

For a few years, I had been a forum moderator for a forum with a few hundred members (at peak times… not online at the same time, though!). We had members from all over the world, aged 13 to 50-something. We allowed all sorts of discussions to happen on the forum. We did have heated debates about politics and religion (fascinating to watch at times with people being so different like us and at a post 9-11 time). Being a moderator taught me a lot and hearing from others now, years after the forum had its prime time, how they saw me back then taught me even more. Some of the younger members were intimidated by me because I was always so reasonable and level-headed. But what I took away from this experience – and the point of this whole rant – is that explaining and communicating is quite often the best way to handle a problem.

There were rules on the forum. When somebody broke a rule, I sent them a private message informing them about the fact. I always pointed them to the rules and added an explanation why we have this rule. Did I have to? Nope. I could’ve just told them off. But I wanted them to understand why we did something in a certain way. “No, you cannot write in 1337″ often led to people feeling provoked to do exactly that and go against what I had said. When I added the explanation that we have people from all over the world whose native tongue isn’t English and that writing like this makes reading and understanding what they want to tell us difficult or even impossible for some usually led them to understand and respect the rule. Later on, I even saw some of the “early troublemakers” turn towards new members and explain to them the rules and why we have them. Always brought a little tear to my eye seeing how they had ‘grown up’ to be responsible community members and how my behaviour (and that of the other moderators) could influence others and, consequently, our whole community.

Now, on to something less happy. I guess lots of us have been there when ArenaNet announced the Collector’s Edition and their game’s prices. We’ve seen it a lot of times before: The dollar sign just gets exchanged with the Euro sign et voilà, the European price. The Collector’s Edition costs $150 and €150. The latter translates to $200. ArenaNet isn’t the first nor the only company to do the pricing this way and as always, there was an outcry. The only reason I’ve ever seen mentioned when companies explained their pricing was “it’s European taxes. They’re higher!” – but how much higher do the taxes have to be for such a difference? We only have 19% VAT so that never made any sense to me.

And then I saw a link to a post on Steam by Double Fine Productions. After having read the posting, it became much clearer. I never knew that in the US you don’t have to pay VAT for online purchases. Nobody ever explained that to me. It still doesn’t explain the whole difference but it gets a lot closer, at least! And it did calm me down and stop me from sulking so much. ;) – By the way, in case anybody is wondering: Yes, I want the Collector’s Edition. But that’s not difficult to decide because I’ll get it as a present. ;)

Back to the topic of educating the masses… Another rather good example is Star Trek Online. Ever since they went free to play, their server (you only have one big server and aren’t divided like you are in games like World of Warcraft, Star Wars: The Old Republic etc.) has had problems and kept crashing every few days. Naturally, players don’t like this behaviour. So they explained what the issue is. Now I don’t understand too much about all this stuff. But I get the part with “trying to find where the bug is” and adding code to get logs (had to do that with my thesis where I had a web-based training and when the students watched an animation, I was supposed to get time stamps on when they do what – pause, play etc. – and that had worked during all tests I’d done but when it went live, it sometimes didn’t work. Turned out that simply uploading the whole course fixed the issue. We still don’t know what it was but at least, it was fixed! ^^). I wasn’t among those flaming or even ranting when STO’s server crashed again. But I, too, was wondering why it took them so long to “upgrade the server” or do whatever necessary, so it could handle the load.

Oh, and because this just came in and fits rather well: ArenaNet released another blog entry on a rather controversial topic – Mike O’Brien on Microtransactions in Guild Wars 2. So far, they have positively surprised me with the way they have communicated about their design decisions and I hope we will always get such in-depth postings even after the game’s release. ;) In today’s post, there are explanations in there for why they’ve made the decision to allow the sale of gems which are bought with real money and I can only hope it works. Namely: The goal would be to reduce the incentive for gold farmers. You all do know that gold farmers are the ones responsible for hacking your friends’ accounts and stealing all the items they had? Making them jump through a few hoops before they get their account restored (depending on the game and quality of support)? Blizzard actually wrote a nice article about this issue some time ago: Purchased gold comes at every player’s expense. Sorry for only linking to it indirectly. I can’t find the original website anymore. So Waybackmachine has to do. But I remember telling a friend about this after she had told me that she sees no harm in spending money on gold so she could get things faster in game when she doesn’t have as much time as others to actually play the game because she has to go work in order to earn money. I told her about hackers and that this is where the gold she bought could have come from. She hadn’t known until then!

I know that those games aren’t made for a few hundred people like our community was. It is much more difficult and time-consuming. You can’t send every forum poster a private message with details and explanations about what they did wrong and why it’s wrong. Also, our forum wasn’t there to earn money for its owner. Those gaming companies, however, need to earn money in order to afford their staff, offices, etc. ;) And with that probably come lawyers, marketing, PR who all want to have a say in what the company can or can’t talk about in detail or even mention to its customers. Although I really wish they could be a bit more open especially when it comes to decisions that cause outrages (like the US-EU pricing usually does). Educate us, please! Explain to us why you’re doing things the way you do them. It might not stop all people from hating, flaming, trolling. But it might make a few understand.

Asking for player feedback

It comes with my job that I know more about questionnaires than I could have ever dreamed (if I ever did dream about making questionnaires and analysing the data afterwards when I was a kid ^^). So naturally, I also watch how game companies ask for feedback. Recently, Warhammer Online set a rather sad example. They wanted to know whether the players from the last German server, Drakenwald, wanted to merge with the last remaining EU server (or do they still have two EU English servers?). If that merge happens, it also means that the German client won’t work properly anymore* and that the support won’t be available in German anymore (at least, that’s what they’d told the French players before they agreed to merge). So what did EA-Mythic-Bioware do? They put up a polldaddy poll. The answer to the question “do you want to merge”? was “NO!”. A few weeks later, a posting on the official forums appeared where players were begging for the merge to happen and the community manager was surprised. Why had they changed their mind within a few weeks? At which point I was surprised and thought: Did they really think this poll was representative? I doubt it. It was a poll on an external side. And it’s just a natural reaction that when we feel strongly about something, we want to make our voices heard. In other words, what could have happened, is that people voted several times. They didn’t want the merge to happen. Of course, it could also be that the majority really was against the merge. My point is: We don’t know. Voting several times is possible and you don’t even need to sign up for an account in order to vote there.

Which leads me to my question: Why don’t game companies add in-game polls for their MMOs? So this way, you can only vote with every account you own. Which would be okay because if you have two accounts, you paid for two. ;) But it’d keep faking poll results to a minimum.

I was just reminded of this because when I logged into Everquest 2, I was greeted by a poll. And I know that Aion has the feature as well. So far, I’ve only seen them use it to distribute extra items (you click and receive this item in your inventory). But I know it can be used for polls and I’d hope they would use it for that at least sometimes. ;)

But I do wonder: Why don’t developers use such a feature more often? From all I know, it’d make so much more sense. I know that a lot of MMO developers/community managers regularly ask for feedback on the forums and I know that the same people also state that the forums aren’t representative of the player base. So why do they use this method instead of asking for feedback within the game? They have the data and could use it for so much information!

Of course, this is just me speculating and wondering without knowing how feasible this method really is. Who knows, maybe they lose 1% of their playerbase with every poll they offer in-game because people are annoyed and rage-quit. ;) I just think it’d make so much more sense than having external polls or asking the minority of forum posters for their opinion while not hearing the opinion of the mass of players of their game.

*Another topic for another time: Client localizations… Apparently, this is a very difficult task to accomplish. In WAR, it just so happens that half of the text you see is shown in the language your client’s in. The other half is determined by the server you’re on. Which meant that when I’d switched my client to English while playing on a German server, that the quests were in English but my skills were in German (or the other way round) and other such absurd things. It did make me laugh but it wasn’t playable. So I switched back to the German client. In this case, if there’s only English servers left, it would mean having to play in Denglish or having to play with the English client which could lead to problems because not every person is capable of reading English that well (and not alll of us learned English at school, mind you! Some had Russian instead, for example).